Tell Him
by winter machine
Summary: Mark, Addison, and Derek in New York, pre-show. Derek doesn't know. Addison should tell him. She wants to tell him. She'll tell him, sometime. (canon-compliant, before the affair comes to light)


**A/N: I'm on a bit of a posting high.** I always liked this story, and never posted it. It's my OG favorite: Mark, Addison, and Derek in New York, pre-show. Since canon never made it clear if the affair started before That Night, here's a one-shot where it did. You could also choose to read all the segments before the last one as fantasy, and that one as the reality.

* * *

 _Tell Him_

She thinks he'll find out. In a way, she's waiting. She writes the story of his discovery in her head, once, then again, changing only the details. He could notice something between them - a glance, a lingering touch. She could slip up, verbally. Or physically. He could walk in on them. They don't do any of those things so she lies in bed beside him, freshly showered, and it's Derek's fingers that find hers, a companionable squeeze. But it's Mark's fingers she feels still, inside her, insistent: she could say _Derek, we need to talk,_ but she doesn't; she presses chapped lips together for a chaste goodnight kiss instead.

..

One time, she thinks she hears him on the stairs. It was stupid to let him fuck her in the marital bed, but he makes her stupid, danger-drunk, his hands all over her. Her heart speeds up at what sounds like footsteps, she says _we should stop_ but probably only in her head because she can't - won't - stop. Nothing happens. No one was there. Old houses make noise: old houses settle. When Derek comes home the next night she twines her arms around his neck. "What?" he asks, and she doesn't have an answer.

..

Mark's bachelor loft is sparsely decorated - soulless, she used to tease him, but it's less funny now. She's bend over a stark modernist sofa, shoulders shuddering in time with his thrusts, long hair swiping his shining hardwood floors. There's no dust anywhere. He must hire someone. She gasps when he grabs a fistful of her hair, like he's still paying attention. She wore the skirt for him, today. The shoes. Slinking past his office was easy enough; they all work together.

They're all good friends.

..

Their anniversary almost passes unobserved: he's forgotten, she thinks, and she wants to ignore it. He catches her off guard in the hospital cafeteria. There are dark circles under his eyes; he's the father of the lanky boy who caught her eye in med school, post-adolescent curls bursting from under a scrub cap. "Twelve years," he says, and she searches for something in his twinkling eyes that's still hers. "Twelve years," she repeats instead, woodenly. Isn't that what marriage is for, self-congratulations?

She twists her rings around her left hand.

She let Mark fuck her in his office that morning, the blinds barely closed. "Do you want to get caught?" Mark asked her when they were done, when he'd collapsed exhausted on her. She could have scraped out a response out with what breath she had, he was crushing her but she didn't exactly want him to get up, either. She lied instead: "you're hurting me," he'd said, and he got up, but not as quickly as he could have. He had a calendar. He was their best man.

 _Find out._

 _Find out._

"Happy anniversary," Addison says, and, eye to eye with him in her surgery sneakers, brings her lips to his.

..

Amy catches them. The click of the door is louder than anything and she's sure this must be what a heart attack feels like, but then it's just Amy, laughing at them. "I won't tell," and she tosses Addison a shirt. "If you let me watch, I mean."

The tips of Mark's ears turn red; they're both still breathing heavily. "Jesus, Amy," Addison says finally, and Amy furrows her brow.

"At least I didn't ask if I could join in."

Addison fumbles for her panties and Amy smiles with something like approval. "Nice landscaping, Addie," she says.

It's Addison's turn to blush now; it's not her usual style but something Mark said the other week made her - well. It's more than she's done, it's flirting with the obvious, but Derek had stumbled exhausted into the bedroom two nights ago while Addison was changing, he couldn't have avoided an eyeful, and never said a word.

..

She's late.

She's never late.

She's frightened, then angry, and then, swallowing antacids with her shame, indifferent. Derek is lecturing at Harvard; Mark is covering for the head of plastics at Sinai, when she takes care of it. She calls neither of them, just Amy, whose eyes sweep over Addison, curled on top of the covers, prescription bottles of antibiotics, the pads of thick cotton.

"I miscarried," Addison says and Amy, two of whose three abortions were performed by Addison herself, doesn't flinch. The sun sinks below the second floor, shadows climbing the white covers, spread with towels. Amy opens a bottle of wine.

"I shouldn't drink," Addison gestures weakly at the antibiotics on her nightstand. The bottle is empty when Amy leaves in the morning; there's no trace at all of the night when Derek comes home three days later.

..

He's meaner, somehow. It's not his touch, which was always the rougher side of gentle, it's more in the way he doesn't meet her eye. It's still good and she takes what he's giving; it's more than she's done in years and she's older now - she's so tired, sometimes, she feels ancient but she's stronger in some ways too. She comes harder, longer, than she ever has. She mutters his name into his sweat-dampened flesh, wondering if he's starting to lose interest.

What comes first: his losing interest, or her fear that he has? She comes first, usually. That night, they come together.

He doesn't stay.

..

She turns forty on a grayish February in the middle of the week. Derek cups her face as she passes him on the way to the en suite and she pauses, tells her jaw to relax into his palms. "Where do you want to have dinner tonight?" he asks and she lets herself enjoy it, just for a moment, before she says she's too old for birthdays and doesn't need to go out and has to pretend she doesn't see the relief in his eyes.

She wonders what it would be like to tell him.

 _Tell him_ , a small voice urges her.

She just says, "I'm not saying no to a gift," forces her voice to be light and teasing even when he begs off, reminding her he's terrible at picking things out, and asks her to buy herself something nice from him instead.

She spends a few thousand dollars at La Perla, lace cutting her hips as she stalks into Mark's apparently empty loft. He must be working late. She swigs the most expensive champagne she can find in his cabinet straight from the bottle and gets herself off a few times before dozing off on his unmade bed.

..

Derek gets an email from his old mentor, across the country. He mentions it to her on a rare Sunday they're both off work, trading sections of the New York Times like the couple they've never been, drinking coffee like civilized strangers. He refills her cup without asking, disturbing the precise balance of that one splash of cream and she finds herself annoyed.

"Do you want to move?" she asks, challenging him more than she usually does, heart speeding up as random words from the arts section float up before her eyes.

"Do you?" he asks.

They sip coffee in detente for what must only be moments before his pager goes off. Needy residents; it's that time of year. He says he won't be long at the hospital but he will be.

He'll find a reason to stay just like she finds reasons not to go.

..

She and Mark are caught on the median of Park Avenue together, and on a balmy late June night it's a typical tangle of the riotous flowers she can see and the rats she can't. taxis whizz by in opposite directions. There's a rustle in the bright pink peonies and she shudders.

Summer in the city is thick with sensation, smells borne so strongly on hot winds it no longer matters if they started out pleasant or vile. She's fingering her blackberry when the light changes and Mark tugs her across the street; it vibrates.

"Derek's done," she tells him when they've finally crossed the street. "Should I tell him to come meet us?"

Mark doesn't answer until just past Lex and then he says "Do what you want, Addison."

..

Derek rolls toward her in bed, rests a questioning hand on a silk-covered hip. She knows that hand, that gesture. She thinks about how to say _no_. She thinks about how to say _stop_. Her lips form the words:

 _I'm cheating on you._

 _I'm sorry._

"Not tonight," she says and she slips away from him, silken material rough on flannel, and in the bathroom vanity she stares at the lines and crevices of her face. The ring of bulbs isn't kind to her aging skin. She prods at the spiderwebs at the corners of her lips, the frown lines from nose to the curve of her mouth. She should have smiled more.

She should have done a lot of things.

Derek's still awake when she drags herself back into the bedroom, still something like hope in his eyes. She fends him off gently, hopes her smile is enough permission for him to take care of it himself. You can't be too careful.

Not yet.

..

The next day the nurse takes her aside, discreetly.

She calls him a bastard. She asks who it was. How many. How old. He laughs her questions off, grabs her swiping hand and pulls her tight against his chest. "Cheaters can't judge," he says. His mocking tone makes her angry; his body, hard against hers, leaves her soft.

It's _win_ , not judge. Cheaters never win.

They wrestle for dominance now, neither one of them winning. Finally she says it, tells it to him straight: "We need to stop doing this."

She says it without much gravitas, maybe, because in the moment her thighs are spread over his and he has one hand just behind her knee in that way he does that drives everything deeper. But she says it, and then she grabs his shoulders and drags herself higher, her chin scrabbling at his neck, so that she feels - but doesn't see - his shrug.

..

Sunlight streams through the windows, reflecting off the marble countertop, bright enough to make her squint. The kitchen smells of freshly ground beans and, faintly, of Derek's soap. His hair is still damp; he smiles briefly at her over the rim of his coffee cup. She thinks about the ways in which people tell themselves the same stories over and over until they get them right. She grips the rubberized handle of the French press that protects her fingers from the burn, lets it hover in the space between them.

She says, "Derek, I want a divorce."

(But only in her head, so that when he says "thanks" and holds out his coffee cup for a refill he probably doesn't understand why her eyes fill with tears.)


End file.
